"The Subject Is Too Great..."

"But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius became the canned goods of intellectuals... the cheap mental stimulants of alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about inauthenticity and forlornness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice- too deep, too great, Shapiro. It torments me to insanity that you should be so misled. A merely aesthetic critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this. You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples."
-Saul Bellow's "Herzog"

I love this quote and put it on my profile. I spend the vast majority of my life trying in vain to get myself out of the shallow existential mire I'm usually in despite knowing about, despite having been exposed to real suffering. Feeling pain is, for fairly self-evident reasons, no fun at all. But give yourself an appropriate level of detachment, enough so you feel the pain through empathy rather than nerve endings, and immense and intense suffering becomes as therapeutic and comforting in its horror as pleasure can be if not more so. When you feel your conscience pang you acutely and feel its purifying sting, it positively stuns you that you- that anyone at all- could find so much to worry about in the fact that modern life is dreary and/or disenchanting and/or disillusioning. Because really, when 25,000 people are dying of starvation on a daily basis, who gives a shit about existential ennui. I feel bad for people who've never wanted to cut their throat for good reasons as opposed to postmodern ones. You need to have felt or even at least witnessed that kind of pain in order to know how to properly use a brain or a heart.